ComScore says 2010 online holiday sales were 12% higher than in 2009, exceeding the web-tracking firm’s expectations. E-commerce is growing every year but Internet Retailers have to give customers what they want not what they think they want to win the e-commerce war.
The secret to getting customers to come back are:
1. Core features come first – these features include search, login, registration, checkout process, and online shopping cart. Don’t over prioritize new features and neglect these. While in the testing phase check for broken links, missing images, and mis-match search results.
2. Know your random users – instead of analyzing user data all day try usability testing. Try about 12 respondents for 1 to 2 hours and let them take a short survey and give feedback. Base this test on core features and also customer service, live chat, customer reviews, price and product comparison, and promo codes and purchases.
3. Prepare for the worst – while software is testing; a real human should be analyzing your site for page load times, graphics and functionality of your core features.
4. Make it mobile – ForeSee Results finds 33% of web shoppers engage in m-commerce, and 11% buy. Because there are hundreds of mobile carriers and devices out there; quality may suffer. That is why, when testing mobile sites, crowdsourcing is the way to go. Crowdsourcing is “the act of taking a job tradition job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to a large group of people in the form of an open call. Test for functionality and usability across language, location, browser, carrier, operating system and others.
5. Protect the customer – are you doing what your privacy policy says you are? Are you sharing personal information with a third party? Is your website being cached? Is your site vulnerable to common security exploits? Or can users get an app to cough up your data? If you have to outsource these activities to a third party vendor do so to protect your customers.
6. When to ditch your data – data can only help you make decisions; that data can’t make decisions for you. Use the “human factor” to provide answers to these questions:
- Are your customers satisfied?
- Is the site user friendly?
- Is the site providing a safe user experience?
- Is it consistent across both web and mobile platforms?
Summarized from a Utest whitepaper “Optimized for E-commerce Oct. 10′.
